“T-Mobile USA will distribute Apple Inc.’s iPhone next year, a deal that will fill a major gap in the fourth-largest U.S. wireless carrier’s product lineup,” Spencer E. Ante and Thomas Gryta report for The Wall Street Journal. “T-Mobile is the only major U.S. wireless carrier that doesn’t offer the iPhone, and its executives have cited that omission as a key reason T-Mobile continues to lose valuable contract customers to competitors.”

“T-Mobile and parent Deutsche Telekom AG said the agreement with Apple will close a key competitive gap,” Ante and Gryta report. “‘We have now added the final piece to the jigsaw to boost the competitiveness of T-Mobile USA sustainably,’ Deutsche Telekom Chairman René Obermann said.”

Ante and Gryta report, “New T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere said that a certain number of customers would not come to T-Mobile stores if the company didn’t have the iPhone. Mr. Legere added that it would launch an Apple product in ‘several months.'”

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23 Comments

T-Mobile is looking better heading into 2013 with the purchase of Metro, their upgraded network in and now the iPhone in 2013. Apple however may have a different view of 2013. They may find themselves in an unfamiliar position of playing price catch-up as they face a new force of “affordable” smart phones from the Nexus 4, Nokia 620 and who knows what Blackberry will bring in early 2013.

The current smartphone share of the US market is about 45-50%. That other half will have something to think about come 2013 when they ponder upgrading their old smart and dumb phones. It will be interesting to see how Apple handles the new competition.

There are no free iPhones out there. The cheapest one offered by Apple (and carriers) is iPhone 4, for $450. When you sign a two-year contract, you only pay monthly loan payments, and there is no down-payment. With 4S, down-payment is $100, and with 5, it is $200 (and up, for bigger models).

There are cheaper Androids, but you end up paying almost as much as for the iPhone, since monthly plans for phones on contract are all the same as for the iPhone, and include the subsidy. Even though the plans are the same, subsidy that carriers pay to Apple is higher than for Androids, so consumers end up being ripped off for buying Android phones (with carriers keeping more of that subsidy money on an Android sale than on an iPhone sale).

Isn’t At&t the only telecom that offers that $99.00 iPhone? They also offer a $0.99 iPhone. Both with a 2 year contract paying $85.00 a month otherwise pay $450-$550. I bet I know where I’ll find you when the iPhone 5S comes out, camped out for days to replace a year old iPhone. Your parents must be proud of you the way you talk down to people for having or not having a particular phone and set priorities in your personal life.

Since the article is about T-Mobile, I thought I’d talk about T-Mobile. I joined them in August (after my other contract had expired), because my old carrier did-and-does not allow smartphones to have a “data free” plan. I’m on wifi 99.999% of the time, T-Mobile has a $40 “data free” plan, so I jumped on it.
I’ve been happy with the service and the coverage, so I’ll soon buy out my wife’s contract and she’ll also be on T-Mobile.

I’ll likely activate a data plan then, but since I’ll be getting “unlimited everything” at roughly half the cost of my old carrier, I couldn’t care less.

But that would give you only 300 talk minutes. Unless you’re a teenager, you likely use 300 minutes in less than two weeks.

T-Mobile’s prepaid plans are still the cheapest from all big four. And their low-cost brand (“Simple Mobile”) has by far the cheapest all-you-can-eat contract-free (and subsidy-free) plan for $40. Bring your GSM phone, get a SimpleMobile SIMM card and you get free talk, text and data (throttling only after 250MB).